Lewd Dungeon Master: This Orc Is Too Damn OP!-Chapter 239: Almost Feel Bad… Almost

"We’re here!"

The penguin arrived at the end of the corridor at a completely leisurely pace. Behind it, the cockatrices followed without a single complaint about the slow advance, stepping right in the penguin’s footsteps. If there was anyone in the Halphas Legion with an issue right now, it was probably just Furcas, struggling to keep up at the penguin’s side.

"Your Highness... aren’t we going a little too slow?"

Even with the death horses in bad shape, Furcas could cover this distance at full sprint in no time. Moving at several times slower than that was nothing short of maddening for a Pale Rider. But the penguin had its own reasons.

"What? So what if we’re slow? We couldn’t exactly rush through here anyway, not with all the traps to check."

"As it turned out, there weren’t any traps at all."

"In the end, sure. But what if there had been even one? What if we’d been sprinting and tripped a wire? They built a pit of hell in thirty minutes, remember? You really think they couldn’t throw together at least one trap in that time?"

The penguin had a point. The enemy had shown an almost uncanny speed at building traps, enough to make you think they had a dedicated trap-making team.

"And hey, can’t you feel something moving around up above and down below?"

"Below, sure, but... above?"

"Yeah."

Thud! The penguin stomped a foot hard against the floor. From below came a strangled sound, clear as day: something choking. The penguin shrugged and clacked its beak together pointedly.

"Try stabbing the ceiling with your scythe up there. Right... there."

The penguin opened its beak toward the ceiling. A small jet of water shot out and pinpointed a spot, and Furcas immediately swung the scythe at that exact location.

THWUCK!!

A substance that looked a lot like slime fluid started oozing down the scythe like blood. Furcas went cold; it hadn’t noticed a thing.

"Wh-what in the..."

"They’ve clearly been crawling around up there and down below, keeping an eye on us the whole time. You said it yourself: when you entered the second cavity, flames shot up from a floor trap. So obviously they did something to the floor, right? Having something set up in the ceiling too feels like overkill, honestly, but still."

Tap-tap-tap!

A faint vibration ran through the soles of Furcas’s feet. Exactly like the penguin said: something was definitely running away down below. Furcas got chills at the penguin’s sheer instincts.

"How did you...?" 𝕗𝚛𝚎𝚎𝐰𝗲𝗯𝗻𝚘𝚟𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝕞

"Gut feeling. I can’t tell what it is, so I’m not gonna poke at it carelessly... but hey, who cares? Whatever comes out is just gonna be some slime or a goblin at best. Next time something pops up, just kill it. Simple as that."

Clack, clack! The cockatrices snapped their beaks in agreement. Whatever came at them, a cockatrice just had to peck it to death or pin it with a talon: done. Catching things that crawled along dirt floors, like sandworms, was actually a cockatrice specialty.

"Anyway, what’s going on here? I’m not picking up any human scent. All I’m getting is slime, animal, and orc sweat."

The penguin sniffed and kicked Furcas in the knee, the death horse’s knee, not Furcas directly, so the body stumbled slightly. Furcas clenched its jaw and held through the pain.

"There were definitely humans among the enemy..."

"Yeah? Sniff, sniff, not a trace of living human. All I’m catching is monsters. The damp smell is slime, and the hot smell is... I don’t know. Ugh, why is it so hot in here? I’m going to get cooked alive."

The penguin opened its beak again and fanned inside with a flipper.

"Let’s take over this place fast, bust open the entrance, and get outside for some air. If we stick around in here much longer I’m going to start getting slow-roasted... hm?"

The path was blocked. The penguin stared ahead for a long moment, then whipped its head around toward Furcas. It flailed its flippers up and down to show just how pissed it was.

"You! Explain what the hell this is!"

Where the penguin was pointing, there was a wall. According to the map Furcas had provided, this was supposed to be an open passage, but a perfectly smooth wall sat there like a dead end.

"It was an open path before!!"

"So the enemy just built a wall just now? Are you kidding me? There’s no way a wall this clean got built in six hours!"

The penguin kicked at the wall in frustration. Common sense said a wall sealing off an entire corridor couldn’t have been thrown together this cleanly in that little time; the odds were basically zero.

"So what is this? The dungeon rearranges itself every time someone comes through the portal? Is this a completely different place now? Or did you lie about what was behind us too? Like you missed another passage or something?"

"N-no! But the dungeon changed! There has to be a passage just past this! The enemy must’ve built this wall because they’re afraid of our attack!"

"Yeah? Then prove it. Either dig through with your scythe, or find whatever mechanism is blocking the way."

The penguin crossed its flippers and stepped back. Furcas raised the scythe high to prove that the memory was right.

"RAAAAH!!"

With a battle cry, Furcas drove the scythe into the wall. It sank in like a pickaxe hitting rock, and Furcas pointed at it triumphantly.

"There’s a gap! This is a wall!"

"Hmm... is that so?"

The penguin carefully placed one flipper just above where the scythe had sunk in.

Drip, drip.

A clear liquid trickled out of the penguin’s flipper, running down the scythe handle. Even though Furcas was a skeleton and shouldn’t feel cold, the liquid was ice cold enough to chill bone.

Tap. Drip, drip.

"Oh, you’re right. Sorry."

The penguin heard the drops hit the ground and apologized on the spot. Furcas felt a flash of frustration, but that anger pointed itself squarely at Andras and that damn orc, not at the penguin.

’The Princess had every reason to doubt. If anyone’s to blame, it’s that orc and Andras for making the Princess doubt in the first place.’

Building a wall this thick just to screw with them: absolutely infuriating. If the scythe had been just a little shorter, Furcas might’ve taken it for a solid wall and never figured it out. Furcas tightened a grip on the scythe with renewed determination.

"Your Highness. Give me a moment. I’ll hack through this wall and clear the way."

"Why bother? Step aside. There’s already a hole; won’t take long."

Furcas quickly yanked the scythe free. The penguin stuck a flipper into the hole Furcas had made, and with the other flipper opened its beak and began to mutter something.

Ssshhhhhh----

A massive torrent of water began flowing out from the penguin’s flipper inside the hole. Dirt and debris splattered onto the penguin’s clothes, but the penguin paid no attention and kept the water flowing.

"Has it soaked through enough yet...?"

The penguin looked the wall up and down and pulled the flipper out. From the ceiling of the passage down to the floor, the wall was completely saturated with water.

"Alright."

The penguin struck the wall with both flippers. In an instant it froze solid, and the penguin took three steps back and pointed at the ice wall.

"Cut through it so we can pass. Arch shape, so it doesn’t collapse. Got it?"

"Yes. One moment."

Furcas lifted the scythe and cut cleanly through the frozen wall: a wide enough opening for the penguin and the cockatrices to pass through comfortably.

Crunch, crunch!

Furcas worked the scythe with precision and carved out an arched doorway. The wall was well over a meter thick, but now, once pushed out or broken, it would open into wherever lay ahead.

"HI-YAAH!"

The penguin waddled forward and kicked the ice wall. It hit too low, and the slab slid and nearly came down on the penguin’s head. The penguin caught it fast with both flippers, stepped back, and threw it flat on the ground.

"Ugh, nothing’s going right from the start..."

The penguin went speechless at the wooden wall that had appeared just three steps ahead. Uneasy, the penguin stepped up onto the fallen ice slab and punched the wooden wall.

WHAM!!

...Past the broken wooden planks, another cave wall appeared.

***

"Oh damn, I forgot to take down the false wall."

I had completely forgotten to remove the partition I’d built as part of the dungeon’s gimmick.

"Got too rushed and forgot to tell the slimes to eat through the planks."

The partition-blocking gimmick.

I couldn’t pull off anything like what you’d see in a sci-fi movie, so I’d used the slimes to collapse the ceiling as a substitute. Luckily, the slimes had picked up Lime’s construction method, and while they couldn’t manage the ultra-thin layers Lime could, building a partition about a meter thick was doable.

Then I’d set up wooden plank false walls to keep things level, so even when the ceiling came down, it would hit the false wall and not flood outward.

"If they know the planks are there, they’ll keep trying to break through."

The sudden appearance of makeshift wooden planks in the middle of the wall would definitely throw the enemy off. And once they realized it was a crude, improvised trick, they’d probably get furious. The false walls needed to come down, but I’d pulled the slimes away for another task in a hurry and just... forgot.

"What do I do. Should I just burn it all now? Just a small flame at the bottom ought to do it."

The small space between the partitions was low on oxygen, but it’d still burn fast enough. Or at the very least get scorched enough to give the enemy something to think about. I asked Shaitan for input.

[I think you can leave it alone for now. The enemy is currently going back and forth between freezing and digging through the cave wall. Breaking through all the false walls is going to take them quite a while.]

"...I almost feel bad."

There were seven false walls in total. Working through all of them was going to cost them real time.

"Same on our end, though. What’s the cockatrice unit up to?"

[The last of them just fully entered the straight-shot corridor. Even if they catch on and try to turn back, it’ll still take some time.]

"Yeah? Then let’s wrap this up clean. Send the slimes. Tell them they don’t need to be pretty about it: just cut off the retreat."

"Got it!"

Lune leapt up and slipped right into a hole in the ceiling. Among the forces currently in the underground section, Lune was the only one with a body small enough to move through those holes, and Lune took the slimes along and crawled through the ceiling ventilation tunnel.

’Lune’s got sharp ears: can tell whether enemies are coming or not.’

It was a pretty risky move, but Lune had shown confidence and volunteered to go handle the mission personally. One slime had poked its head out and gotten stabbed by a scythe, but as long as they stuck to spots where the enemy wasn’t, they wouldn’t get caught.

"Hope the retreat gets sealed up nice and tight."

To wipe out the cockatrice unit entirely, I boldly gave up the advantage of the straight corridor and instead refitted basement 1 on the fly.

"Too bad it ended up being cockatrices that walked into the death trap. I figured I could bury around five hundred of them."

[Still, you take what you can get. A unit that size is probably all hitting three stars. Their actual levels are probably just barely at three stars, but still.]

"Fair enough. No use getting greedy. Alright, Shaitan: if anything happens up top, let me know right away."

I dropped down into the middle of the orcs digging through the floor of the 2nd intercept room. About four meters deep, with orcs hauling the excavated dirt forward. Orcs that had survived and orcs freshly resurrected by the magic stones, none of them cared which: they were all shoveling away with everything they had.

"This is going to be the cockatrices’ burial ground. So make sure it’s ready. We’re gonna roast them alive."

I was counting on the cockatrices to act exactly like what they looked like. The thought of getting some proper chicken for the first time in a while had me practically drooling.

"Listen up! When this battle’s over, it’s one bird per person, no, one cockatrice per person!"

...If they were too big for one per person, squads could share one each.

***

"Hm, hm, hm~"

Lune crawled quickly along the floor, moving ahead of the slimes. To carry out the plan of burying the enemy using the dungeon law Rok had discovered, Lune moved with extreme care through the ceiling ventilation tunnel that connected to the straight-shot corridor.

"...."

A dead slime came into view ahead. The slimes crawling in front of Lune trembled as if shaken, but Lune reached out and calmed them down.

"We’ll get them back, right?"

Gurgle.

The slimes stepped over their fallen comrade and pressed on toward the destination. Lune also crept slowly through the ventilation tunnel, making sure not to be spotted by the cockatrices below.

"Sniff, sniff, does anyone smell something... fragrant?"

Lune froze.

Lune had just passed roughly half the cockatrice unit when the penguin’s voice carried up from below.

"That’s an elf scent, isn’t it...?"

Lune’s heart dropped.